In recent years, mobile stations have become “must have” devices for most people, in many countries. The communications that such devices offer, via wireless mobile communications network, enable users to talk and exchange various types of messages for business and personal reasons and to access information, all from or while traveling through any location where a network provides service.
There are situations, however, where it is undesirable or impractical for a user to receive and participate in an incoming call directed to the user's mobile station. For example, a user might not desire to receive a call during a work meeting or during a social occasion. In other situations, users may be busy performing a physical activity that could otherwise be hindered or disrupted in the person were to engage in an interactive phone conversation. Additionally, it is becoming more and more frequent for people to have a single mobile station as a main telephone. Often, there are situations where the user receives a call from a calling party with an unknown number, not recognized by the user. In other situations, due to a required option that networks provide users with the ability to hide their number when calling, mobile station users often receive calls from phones having blocked numbers.
Voicemail service, provided through a central office of the network has become commonplace for both landline and mobile station customers. If a call can not be completed to an intended destination, in the mobile scenario, to the intended destination mobile station, then the network redirects the call to a voicemail system. The voicemail system is a specialized computer that answers the call and stores a message from the caller in digital form. Many of the situations outlined above, where it is undesirable or impractical for a user to receive and participate in an incoming call directed to the user's mobile station, result in calls routed to a network platform providing the voicemail service to the mobile subscriber where the callers leave messages for later retrieval. Once stored, a voicemail message is available for retrieval and playback to the intended recipient. However, playback often entails a later call to the voicemail system. Many older customer premises-based answering machines offered a monitoring capability in the form of an audible output of the caller's voice message, in real-time, as the machine recorded the audio of the incoming message. However, with voicemail, the call is redirected to the voicemail platform. Hence, there is no link to the called subscriber's mobile station during message recording, therefore traditional network based voicemail has not offered a real-time message monitoring capability.
The need for a later call to retrieve a message imposes a delay on the called party's ability to hear the message and determine its importance. Hence, there is still room for an improved/simplified technique for accessing a voicemail message.